The present invention relates to a wire harness and a method of manufacturing the wire harness. Particularly, it relates to a wire harness having a predetermined configuration while interposing electrical wires between two sheets of resinous materials for the purpose of the improvement in assembling property to a vehicle body or the like, and a method of manufacturing the wire harness.
In prior arts, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publications (kokai) Nos. 5-314833, 62-290307 and 6-28922 and Japanese Unexamined Utility Model Publications (kokai) No. 62-192508, etc. disclose a flat wire harness consisting of two resin sheets between which electrical wires are interposed.
Now, we describe a method of manufacturing the flat conventional wire harness in brief.
First of all, a flat sheet for mounting the wires thereon is mounted on an upper flat suction plate. The flat sheet is provided with many suction holes.
Next, upon wiring electrical wires on the flat sheet, it is covered with a cover film. Then, by sucking air between the flat sheet and the cover film through the suction holes, the sheet, the electrical wires and the cover film are stuck to each other. Hereat, since hot-melt adhesive agent has been previously pasted on an under face of the cover film, the above suction is carried out under condition that the cover film is softened by a heater while the hot-melt adhesive agent is melted.
Consequently, the air between the sheet and the cover film is sucked, so that the cover film sticks to the sheet certainly. During the sucking, the softened cover film is so deformed and stuck as to follow to a wiring route for the electrical wires, while the cover film is joined to the sheet by means of the adhesive agent melted, providing a flat-shaped wire harness in form of the integrated structure.
In this way, a shape of the conventional wire harness has been limited to a so-called "two-dimensional" configuration (flat shape) since the electrical wires are arranged on a flat base or a sheet. Therefore, such a limited configuration causes the number of vehicle body's spots for attachment with the wire harness to be decreased correspondingly.
However, it should be noted that there are a lot of spots of the vehicle body where the electrical wires have to be wired through a "three-dimensional" route with great changes in wiring level height, in comparison with the number of spots where the electrical wires are to be wired through a two-dimensional wiring route. Thus, it has been desired an improvement in assembling property of the wire harness.